Hi,
I haven’t got HA yet, and wanting to use it in my house. Are there any companies that sell decent devices, maybe with 16 or 32 gb ram or more with it pre installed on the device?
I wanted something power enough to run my cctv along with audio TV lighting etc.
I am in the UK.
Thanks
If you want to run cctv stuff I would be looking at a mini pc, cameras can use a lot of resources, but it really depends on what you want the cameras to do and how many you have.
As for preinstalled don’t bother HAOS is dead easy to install if you follow the docs.
And you may not want to hear this bit, if you are not confident enough to install HAOS you are soon going to struggle with HA.
The best kit to run HA on to test it out is an old PC or similar you have laying around doing nothing. The next best hardware is a VM on a pc or mac.
No point spending cash on kit if HA is not for you.
I see, I’ll take a look. I was thinking plug and play, but if it’s easy to install then may give it a try.
How about when the updates come through each month, does it then mean you need to do some work on it to make things you’ve linked to HA to work again?
From time to time there will be breaking changes that applies to your setup, but make a habit of reading release notes before any update and you should be fine.
You could buy the HA green.
But test out whether you like it or not first.
Just press the get started button and read.
I’ve been fiddling with HA for a year now.
Bought myself the HA Green with Skyconnect usb dongle (zigbee/thread). It’s a supereasy, straight-out-of-the-box way to start. Just plug it in, check on your router which ip was given to the HA Green, open a browser an type the ip:8123.
That’s all to get started! Think i paid around 120 euro incl shipping. Which, for me, was peanuts to get a look and feel with HA.
Also, you’ll be supporting the Home Assistant Foundation.
Now i’m running 4 add-ons, 18 integrations and have about 70 physical devices (bulbs, switches, sensors,…) controlled by HA.
At the moment, i’m looking to migrate to a more powerfull platform to run HA on. I’ll defenitely keep the HA Green as a backup. It’s rock-solid!
Would not recommend it as an nvr, look for a seperate solution. Like Reolink ie. And integrate it with HA.
Look at HA as the brains that put everything together, not as the body that does the work…
Hope this info helps
Thanks. Yes I was thinking of it as the brain, hence looking at more powerful alternative devices, as currently doing a whole house renovation and rewire so want to automate lights, cctv etc and have a screen on the wall to control it.
Do you think the green could handle displaying a few cameras on the screen as well ss potentially 50-60 light circuits, audio and visual control around the house, until I upgrade it to a more powerful device when more confident with it? Obviously not all lights would be switched on at the same time etc.
This really depends on what you want your cctv to do, and what cameras you intend to use. Also if you are the sort who likes to play with this sort of stuff.
You can get cameras that do detection and stuff on their own hardware, but this is often not local and I don’t know much about them. If you want everything local and with person and object detection, face recognition and alike then running frigate nvr is the best answer, which for more than a couple of cameras will take a reasonable mini pc and a gpu to handle it.
So you really need to be honest with yourself and what you are likely to want from it before committing to buying hardware.
I may have mentioned try HA before buying as it really might not suit you. It can take a lot of tinkering or none at all. Most users though are tinkerers, so be aware your wants may grow as you start to find out what HA can do, it did for nearly all us here 
IMHO. No truer words spoken.
Don’t buy a box and put HA on it looking for a problem to solve. Solve your problem with ha first and then buy the box to spec.
(understand your problem clearly first. Rn you don’t - you just know you want HA)
Second TBH the minute someone says video. No green. No yellow, no anything based on a pi core. Go straight to a minipc. The least powerful current one today knocks the ever living snot out of a pi and with enough ram will definitely last three plus years (your longevity goal for said box - don’t pretend you can plan 5 or more years out on hardware)
And you’re installing it on this hardware yourself. You don’t want to buy anything pre-installed I don’t see good behavior in those markets honestly and you’ll need to know how to install and maintain your system.
Yes it will " a few cameras, ofcause depending upon various “scenarios” as mentioned by Arh.
I can say i started the other way around, Device with Sufficient Hardware, but now actually bought a Green, to handle my “essential” daily automations, with few “utilities camera overview” etc ( no camera motion tracking/face recon , motion detect only for internal use), so my “Current” will eventually handle " Maitenance heat and cameras and alarm system ( Some Cameras will most like end up in Frigate or similar, on same #Sufficient hardware )
So it’s not a bad start to buy a Green( and it cost probably less than 1 good cctv camera ) , so you can get familiar with HA, and same time look for other hard(i.e older laptop or similar, as rather good performance laptops is of no use for some people, after windows 11 / Microsoft decided not to support a huge amount of very extreme powerfull CPU’s, sufficient for running cctv and a whole bunch of other tasks such as external backups etc